You may have to wash the salt first
Sometimes expiration dates refer to when enough plastic from the packaging has decayed into the food material that it might be a problem. Bottled water works that way.
I don’t know:
- How much science there is behind the dating
- How much plastic you’re consuming in your food anyway and so who cares what’s the difference
- Whether that’s what’s going on with this salt package specifically
But it’s not automatically crazy for there to be an expiration date on an immortal product if it comes packaged up in plastic.
I’m no expert, but I did watch a minidocumentary that explained that these best by dates are mostly arbitrary aside from perishable foods.
For some products they’ll have taste testers rate the same product packaged at different times from 1-10 with 10 being factory fresh, and when it drops below an average of 7, that’s the date they put on the packaging
Yeah. I feel like they probably just pick some random bullshit, and if people get botulism they look at reducing it, and if they throw away a quarter-million dollars worth of product that expired they look at increasing it, and if neither of those happens then they don’t worry about it. I have no knowledge of it but even hearing that they do taste tests is a little surprising to me. But I am cynical.
I did know some people who were once “employed” on a sort of temp job that was excising already-passed expiration dates from a massive number of cans of fish, and then stamping new later dates on them.
☹️
Changes in texture are used for the best by dates too.
Yeah but this kind of salt they only taste test every half million years or so, so the expiration dates cant be trusted to be that precise.
Yeah a lot of the dates are just guesses that they know for a fact it will last longer. They are required to put a date but not required to actually test how long an item lasts. A lot of items last much longer than their expiration date. Salt should be good indefinitely.
I think the law is to enforce “open dating” instead of having some secret coding that hides info from the consumer. What date they put on there is totally up to the manufacturer, so unless you can match dates and experience with the optimal time to eat something, it’s only useful to make sure you got the latest product compared to the rest on the shelf at that time.
Climate Town had an excellent video on the subject. (since they’re always excellent)
While I’ve always thought that, I’ve also heard that it’s the point where the plastic may not be reliable enough to contain or keep the contents uncontaminated. Either way, it’s the plastic.
You would think that the abrasive nature of the salt would shave off more plastic than the plastic breaking down. I guess you need to keep track of how many earth quakes you get and how much you shake the container when you get salt.
Now I am just annoyed not everything has a plasticless alternative packaging
And to think of how mad everyone got when everything was packaged in those ‘heavy’ glass bottles and jars, and manufacturers started putting everything into plastic because the glass was creating too much litter on the roads. Now here we are 30 years later and everyone is being killed by plastic.
manufacturers started putting everything into plastic because
the glass was creating too much litter on the roadsplastic was cheaper.Fixed. It’s always about profit.
Some tourists in the Museum of Natural History are marveling at some dinosaur bones. One of them asks the guard, “Can you tell me how old the dinosaur bones are?”
The guard replies, “They are 65,000,011 years old.”
“That’s an awfully exact number,” says the tourist. “How do you know their age so precisely?”
The guard answers, “Well, the dinosaur bones were sixty five million years old when I started working here, and that was eleven years ago.”
Yes, salt doesn’t go bad
But this looks like natural salt, so no preservatives 😁
Maybe they used natural preservation like, let’s say, salt? OP should check the ingredients
This comment is absolute gold.
Glad to be of service
It’s probably NaCl
What a salty response
250 million years ago to 2019. This salt had a good run.
Well, I understand that with some years in an plastic bowl, the salt may absorb some substances and microplastics. But about Honey, what comes in glass jars? There they also put an expiration date, even though still edible honey has been found in several thousand years old Egyptian tombs.
The expiration date - unless it’s a different legal definition where you are from - is not really about being edible, but just signifies the guarantee the producer gives, basically “up until this date we will guarantee this product will maintain the expected quality”. In this case, I think it will be them not guaranteeing that the salt won’t have drawn water from the air and clumped up or something like that.
It’s required by law so they have to put something.
As weird as it sounds, this actually isn’t true in general. Except on baby formula, it’s not required by federal law. Some states require it and some don’t, but it’s more or less put there voluntarily by everyone because they don’t want spoiled stuff going around with their name on it.
Youre also more likely to replace it after its “expired”
That’s just the data after which the microplastics have aged to their finest toxicity
Anyone else hate it when products fluff themselves up with dramatically grandiose blurb? FORMED BY THE PRIMAL SEA shut the fuck up
Part of my job is to write that kind of copy. If you take it seriously, you’ll drive yourself nuts.
You should start every one with “originally formed inside of an actual star” or something similar.
Wrenched from the platonic forms through seething quantum foam as the Demiurge’s machinations reach fruition, our custom-made mounting clamps won’t fail you like your precious god.
Possibly. Depends on what your use case is, perhaps the container it’s stored in is degrading and putting some contaminants on the salt itself, microplastics and the like
Do my microplastics go bad? I don’t want to get sick from expired microplastics.
From what I heard, salt is usually packaged with iodine or some substances that prevent clumping that expire over time. So after some time the salt won’t have those anymore, but it should be safe to consume. Salt cannot spoil because bacteria cannot grow in salty places.
Don’t know how plastic containers relate to that sadly.
Iodine in salt is a health measure, people were not getting enough iodine, so they added it to the salt
But that’s not going to degrade.
Lots of salty comments in this thread
More than 250 million years of shelf life, I think it can last a few million years more.
I would.
if you think microbes got in that can survive in salt and are harmful to humans (which is unlikely), you can bake it in your oven a bit (without the container)
Can any organism live on 100% salt? I was able to find info on hypersaline solutions, but I would think that existing on a pure polar solute would pretty much just kill by osmosis right?
I guess a few spores don’t mind salt, but i don’t know for sure. That’s why I wrote microbe.
Yes.